With the continued proliferation of communications networks; from the Internet to cable TV, IPTV, mobile broadband, WiFi, and home networks; and an ever-growing demand for data to be sent over these networks; concerns about network congestion are becoming more pervasive. As fast as larger pipes can be provided, user demand threatens to fill them. Best-effort mechanisms for data delivery like those underpinning the Internet often prove insufficient.
Network congestion concerns may be particularly serious for narrow, asymmetrical channels such as the out-of-band (OOB) channel of a cable TV network. OOB cable channels are increasingly strained by requirements to handle traffic generated by enhanced TV applications such as those implemented using the Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) or Open Cable Application Platform (OCAP) standards. Such traffic may include voting and polling data, user preference and statistics traffic, t-commerce information, and other data. Data delivery over DSL and mobile broadband networks faces similar challenges.
To address the problem of network congestion over band-limited networks, various approaches have been described. Some include: packet dropping (via “tail drop” or Active Queue Management), TCP congestion avoidance, Explicit Congestion Notification, window shaping, traffic shaping (i.e., packet delaying), Quality of Service (QoS) schemes, and related bandwidth reservation techniques.
What is needed are systems and methods for regulating network bandwidth to reduce congestion in a way that allow nodes to continue processing while waiting to send and receive data and without requiring long messages, excessive handshaking, or other QoS-type overhead.